Obituary; Philosophy prof sank his teeth in to gardening at a very young age

Sam Roberts

Biting his third-grade teacher, Mrs Leghorn, on the ankle in 1943 was a career master stroke for young Allen Lacy. He was expelled from elementary school and placed on what he described as "parole", under the supervision of a fourth-grade teacher named Ruth Harkey who happened to run a small garden nursery. Mrs Harkey was also a breeder of bearded iris. "She taught me the elements of hybridization," Lacy recalled years later, "and I was hooked at the idea of interfering with nature to bring something new into being."

Lacy, who became a renowned gardening columnist and author, worked for his "parole officer" after school and on Saturdays– and spent 25 cents, his entire weekly allowance, to buy his first plant (a hybrid yellow iris called Happy Days, introduced in 1934). Later, after his family moved from a farm back to Dallas, Texas, Lacy was hired at a seed store where he was required to memorize its catalogue.

Advertisement

Lacy was originally a philosophy professor who had his doctoral dissertation on Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish writer, accepted by a publisher in the Netherlands. But he was less successful as a novelist and with his wife's encouragement, he wrote an essay about gardening, which was accepted by Horticulture magazine and captivated a Wall Street Journal editor, who hired him as a columnist.

For Lacy, a gardening column was about more than dishing the dirt (an inelegant word he always preferred to soil). "Gardening is not a hobby, and only non-gardeners would describe it as such," he asserted in his book The Inviting Garden: Gardening for the Senses, Mind and Spirit (1998). "There is nothing wrong with having hobbies, but most hobbies are intellectually limited and make no reference to the larger world. By contrast, being wholeheartedly involved with gardens is involvement with life itself in the deepest sense." Author Michael Pollan described Lacy as a role model who "showed me that you could bring real ideas into what had been a fairly light genre without losing the amateur vibe of garden writing."

(David) Allen Lacy was born in Dallas. His father, David, was a stockbroker. His mother was the former Jetta Surles. Allen graduated from Duke University with a bachelor's degree in English in 1956, attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and earned a doctorate in religion from Duke. He taught at several colleges before becoming a philosophy professor at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona (now Stockton University).

In his various gardening columns for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Lacy rhapsodized about the unfamiliar flora offered by the mail-order nurseries, the insect-repelling powers of bath oils, and his transformation of a one-acre plot in Linwood formerly occupied by an electrical substation into "the smallest arboretum in the world." "Gardening is one of the very few human pursuits in which moral questions almost never arise," he wrote in 1989. "The only two I can think of are stealing a plant or collecting one from the wild — and it is only in recent years that taking a wild plant has been widely accepted as wrong."

For all the profound issues reflected in his columns — from the extinction of certain species to the symbolism of the American front lawn — Lacy suggested his gardening had not influenced his teaching. "Philosophy had great, often unanswerable, questions," he said. "In horticulture, the basic questions had answers. (Which end of the bulb points down?)"

He is survived by his wife, the former Hella Goethert, two sons and five grandchildren.